


Singularity of Hope

by lothkitten



Category: Sunshine (2007)
Genre: Gen, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2007
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-25
Updated: 2007-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-29 01:13:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/314217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lothkitten/pseuds/lothkitten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During her last moments, Corazon reflects on what brought her to this point.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Singularity of Hope

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fleshghost](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=fleshghost).



> Many thanks to Mojave Dragonfly for genre betaing and CoriLannam for fandom specific betaing!

One dash of green, amid the dark and destruction. Just one, a singularity of hope. She had heard of the lush, undreamed of paradise on Icarus I, and for those few moments, a glimmer, a thrill of a future blinded her. She'd allowed the possibility of existence to creep into her heart all too quickly. And then the Icarus I was gone. Paradise had been left behind forever. There was no redemption here, no second chances. They were falling, like the namesake of their ship, into the obliterating white hot beams of a dying star.

There could be no true hope now, not even from this growth of green, this one last reminder of earth and humanity. In her heart she knew that, knew one tiny plant, barely out of its seed, could never grow and reproduce in time to provide them with the oxygen they needed. Death was the certainty, the reality, but even if it was a false hope, kneeling among the black, the soot, the grit that had once been tenderly cultivated soil, she would cling to it, as the bit of a plant was clinging to the ashes of her garden.

A fascination with watching the earth part, the rippling leaves breaking free and slowly reaching towards the light, that was what had fueled her early love of growing green things. Antiquated, her family thought her. No one spends time doing that now, her parents chided her. Why bother with something that is not a dying art, but all ready dead?

An aunt took her to the Amazon Memorial Garden as a sixteenth birthday present. The high glass walls, taller even than the mega-skyscraper she grew up in, were fuzzed over with moss that dripped down onto the highest tree branches and filtered the light. Brightly coloured birds swooped there, flashing and flaring, desperate for the sky and the warmth of a sun they had never known. Surrounded by the forest's richness, the sudden heat of life overcame her, and turning to her aunt, eyes glowing and glittering with the presentiment glories of a teenager's dreams, she vowed to devote her life to whatever would renew such beauty in the real world, outside of its glass and metal cage. Her aunt had smiled, gently but kindly, and given her word of recommendation to a botanist friend of a friend. When she was twenty, and finished with her degree, she went to intern at the Memorial Garden. Her bliss was sealed.

Nothing held as great a fascination for her as her work did. Parents and friends, desperate to see her in something besides her work clothes, covered in traces of dirts from around the world and eternally stained green about the knees, her fingernails not having seen a manicure, well, ever, tried to drag her to parties and her mother's salons, where she would stare, comparing the politicians to overgrown dandelions, so full of themselves they could care less for their weedy status, and gossiping society ladies to a particularly nasty kind of insect she found trying to insinuate itself into the roots of a rare coastal fern (catch her allowing someone else to check things over in the air-tight transfer dock when a new shipment of specimens came in again). Eventually everyone left her to her own peace. Once they'd seen her eyes light up while gazing adoringly at a plant she'd rescued from some corner of the earth thought dead to plant-life, they could no longer begrudge her the path she'd chosen, solitary and dirty as it was.

When she was twenty-nine she went on an exposition to set up a research center in the far northwest reaches of where it was advisable to go, disappearing from contact for months. She returned and became even more solitary than before, new species of greenery her only companions. When she was thirty her daughter was born. Small and curious and wondering, she raised Kokoro alone and gave her the only gift she could, her knowledge and love of things that grow. On the tiny gardener's eighth birthday she asked to dye her hair green, so she could be more like her friends. As much as it hurt to send her away, Kokoro went off to a regular school in the city the next year, away from the warmth of country greenhouses and her private tutors and into a life where children played with toys and each other, not plants. Then, three weeks before the announcement of the Icarus II project, Kokoro and her class, coming back from a field trip to the ice-deserts, were killed when a blizzard enveloped their hover-sled.

She sent in her application the day the call for volunteers arrived at her research facility. She had no human ties, nothing to hold her back on a mission that could mean death, no one to miss her, no one to miss, save her plants, most of which she took. She was the perfect botanist for a mission to blow up the sun.

She threaded her fingers through the dirt, noting as it parted that there was hardly any moisture left. How? How did... but no, better not to challenge things. Better to block off that part of her mind accustomed to years of scientific research and thought. That was the past, there was no time for such drawn-out processes now. If she let herself begin to wonder, to try and question the possibility of the little plant's very existence, she could lose precious seconds. But what good were precious seconds when the finality of everything was so close, so inevitable? What good was anything beyond staring into the face of this minute sprig of promise, taking from it all the strength of life and growth and beauty it could give to her? She called it Kokoro, whispering the name, tying herself to it with emotion. Letting her fingertips brush against the still pliable leaves, she smiled down at it, her only gift in exchange for its hope.

Shadows, darkness, swirled around her, unheeded, as the plant kept her in thrall. She bent, as if to kiss the pale life before her, proof somehow that although paradise was still cut off from humanity, they had not been forsaken utterly. Could the plant be moved, could she take it back to her lab and care for it there? The dirt, the ashes, the whole environment was so repulsive to life, so tenuous a place for development. But then she smiled at the plant, and shook her head. It was stronger than that, stronger than she was, to be born into this place and thrive as it had. She would stay beside it, live out the rest of her own existence here, nurture it as best she could. She would find contentment even in the smallest of wonders.

One dash of red, amid the dark and destruction.

  



End file.
